Trade unionism in North America had its beginnings in a transition during the late 18th century from a mutualist/dependent to a free wage-labour system. As journeymen artisans moved out of what has been called “economic clientage” to master craftsmen, they found their interests in conflict with those of their employers. Only through collective effort could workers enforce the list of “prices” they established for their work and defend their trades against cheap and diluted labour. The first identifiable labour strike dates from 1768, when journeymen tailors in New York City stopped work to resist a pay cut. Sustained labour organization began with the Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers (shoemakers) in Philadelphia in 1794. The first sign of a labour movement—that is, organizational activity exceeding the narrow sectional interests of particular crafts—appeared in Philadelphia, where the various craft bodies joined in 1827 to form the Mechanics’ Union of Trade Societies. In Canada, these developments were slower to emerge: the first craft locals appeared in Montreal in 1827 and in Toronto in 1832, and the earliest city central came only in 1871, with the formation of the Toronto Trades Assembly. The first national union of locals in a single trade to survive, the National Typographical Union, was formed in 1852 in the United States. Like other national unions that followed, it chartered locals in Canada as well; this led to its renaming in 1869 as the International Typographical Union—a designation that became common in North American unionism.

Rooted as it was in the preindustrial trades, this early trade unionism did not lose its essential craft character with the onset of industrialization. Mule spinners, molders, machinists, and iron puddlers and rollers were employing new skills, and they functioned in a factory context, but they had much the same collective concerns as did traditional craftsmen and fitted readily into the emergent trade-union structure. On the railroads, too, the key jobs were defined as operating “crafts.” Even with the quickening pace of industrialism, then, North American trade unionism in the 19th century was overwhelmingly a movement of skilled workers.

But job consciousness, powerful though it was, by no means constituted the sole, or even predominant, inspiration for collective activity. Historical research on working-class life has demonstrated that labour consciousness was a complex phenomenon, rooted in distinctive structures of culture, community, and ideology as well as in craft identity. American workers of the Jacksonian era adhered to a conception of artisan republicanism, which celebrated producerist values and the republican ideals of the American Revolution. Counter to this vision ran the corrosive impact of emergent industrial capitalism, which, in the view of the Philadelphia Workingmen’s Party, created “invidious distinctions [and] unjust and unnatural inequalities” by dividing Americans into “two distinct classes, the rich and the poor.” Beginning with workingmen’s parties in the 1830s, a series of labour-reform movements fought a running battle for “equal rights.” In the 1860s, this was the task of the National Labor Union and, after its decline, of the Knights of Labor. On their face, these reform movements seemed to cut athwart trade unionism, insofar as they aspired to the cooperative commonwealth rather than simply to a higher wage, appealed broadly to all “producers” rather than strictly to wage workers, and thought of themselves as broadly inclusive political and educational movements. But contemporaries saw no contradiction here: trade unions tended to workers’ day-to-day needs, labour reform to their higher hopes. While the two were accepted as strands of a single labour movement, however, it was well understood that they were strands that had to be kept operationally apart.

During the 1880s, that functional separation began to break down. The international craft unions, having by now emerged as the dominant element in the trade-union structure, became less tolerant of challenges to their jurisdictions and internal lines of authority. For its part, despite a robust labour-reform rhetoric, the Knights of Labor began to act increasingly like a rival trade-union movement, carrying on strikes and organizing workers along industrial rather than craft lines. When the Knights rejected a proposal reaffirming the historic separation of trade-union and labour-reform functions, the alarmed internationals joined in December 1886 and formed the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The immediate aim was to drive the Knights from the industrial field, and, thanks largely to the Knights’ own confusion and to employers’ counterattacks, this was speedily accomplished. But more important in the long run was the permanent stamp that the AFL made on the American labour movement. This was partly institutional: the AFL legitimized the emergent trade-union structure that gave preeminence to the rule of the internationals. But equally significant was the enunciation of a guiding labour philosophy—“pure and simple” unionism—under the aegis of Samuel Gompers and his circle of Marxist trade unionists. Labour reform was thenceforth denied any further role in the struggle of American workers. The weapons in that struggle were to be defined as economic and not political; the participants would be strictly wage workers organized along occupational lines; and the objective of trade unionism became exclusively the incremental achievement of higher wages and better working conditions.

In Canada these American events had very considerable consequences. Given the sparse settlement and small industrial base, Canadian unions found it difficult to build a national structure of their own. An attempt initiated by the Toronto Trades Assembly in 1873 soon failed. It was also natural, given the colonial (after 1867, dominion) ties to Britain, for Canadian workers to look to English unions, and at least two groups—the carpenters and engineers—in fact built up sizable Canadian memberships after 1850. But the much more compelling links were to the United States, partly because labour markets in many skilled trades ignored the national boundaries and partly because the American unions were the readiest source of institutional assistance. By the end of the 1880s, as many as half the organized workers in Canada were in locals affiliated to internationals with headquarters in the United States. And it was this segment of Canadian labour that was mainly responsible for forming, parallel to the AFL, the Trades and Labor Congress (TLC) in 1886.

For some years, the TLC followed its own bent. The Knights of Labor had been highly successful in Canada, notably in Quebec. After virtually disappearing from the United States in the early 1890s, the Knights remained a considerable force in Canada, and, although strictly excluded from the AFL, were made welcome in the TLC. As late as 1901, moreover, its president was proposing that the Canadian branches break their links with the internationals, form their own national unions, and turn the TLC into a wholly Canadian movement. But in 1902 just the opposite transpired. The TLC expelled the Knights and adopted the AFL principle of opposition to dual unionism, which meant that the Canadian branches of the internationals gained a virtual monopoly on trade-union representation in the TLC. It became, in effect, the Canadian wing of the American movement. Responding to Canadian political conditions, the TLC was somewhat more flexible than the AFL on issues of independent labour politics and state intervention, but, on the whole, American pure-and-simple unionism exerted the commanding influence on Canadian unionism in these years.

Only in Quebec did a very different tradition assert itself. Here, following a lockout of boot and shoe workers in 1900, the Roman Catholic church stepped in and, in accordance with the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), encouraged the unionization of Quebec workers. The result was a vigorous French Catholic movement, the Confédération des Travailleurs Catholiques du Canada, which stands as a unique instance of confessional unionism in North America. Only after World War II did Quebec unionism shed its links to the church and evolve into a secular movement.

Challenges to pure-and-simple unionism

In the American West, pure-and-simple unionism was challenged in 1905 by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The IWW had two sources. One was the socialist left wing, which had concluded that the AFL could not be captured and made over into the necessary trade-union base for socialist electoral politics. The second was a western brand of working-class radicalism forged by a decade of industrial war in the western mining states. The two groups proved incompatible, and the IWW, dominated by radicals from the Western Federation of Miners, drove out the socialists and committed itself to a syndicalist version of class war, in which political action was excluded. Struggle would centre on direct industrial action and ultimately on the revolutionary general strike, and out of that would emerge a workers’ society organized on the basis of industrial unions. The IWW led a number of important strikes in the east between 1907 and 1913, but its main theatre of operations was among western workers, including Canadians, in metal mining, lumber, transportation, and agriculture. During World War I, however, the IWW was violently suppressed, and it never regained the organizational momentum of its peak years between 1914 and 1917.

The Canadian version of western syndicalism sprang into life in 1919, just as the IWW was expiring. This was the One Big Union (OBU), which had its roots in a postwar labour disaffection from conventional trade unionism that was especially pronounced in western Canada. Structured more along geographic than along the industrial-union lines of the IWW, the OBU had its moment of glory in the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, and for a few years thereafter it virtually displaced the TLC as the dominant movement in the four western provinces. The OBU, despite its swift collapse, left behind a significant regional legacy: thereafter, the western provinces would persistently be the site of a more progressive, politically active brand of Canadian trade unionism.

The syndicalist challenge stemmed, to some degree, from the failing fortunes of pure-and-simple unionism in the early decades of the 20th century. The essence of that formulation had been to locate labour’s struggle firmly in the industrial arena. But the struggle for collective bargaining proved to be much harder than Gompers and other trade unionists had anticipated. Where competitive pressures were severe enough, as in bituminous coal mining, not even the most innovative and determined of union efforts at market control proved sufficient—hence the collapse of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) in the 1920s. Elsewhere, as in the metal-fabricating industries, the problem was the speed of technologicalinnovation and, in particular, the perfection of mass-production methods, which undercut the role of craft workers. Scientific management, moreover, demanded strict supervisory control over the workplace and hence posed a profound threat to customary patterns of workers’ autonomy in the labour process. When an effort to find common ground in the Murray Hill agreement (1900) between the International Association of Machinists and the National Metal Trades Association failed within a year, the die was cast: a quarter-century of bitter industrial warfare ensued. Labour’s fortunes varied at different times and places, but the end result was unquestionably an arrested labour movement, with union penetration settling at roughly 10 percent of the nonagricultural labour force. As welfare capitalism took hold in the New Era of the 1920s, the more advanced sectors of the industrial economy seemed quite beyond the reach of the AFL.

With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, the balance of forces in the United States shifted dramatically. To begin with, national politics became more favourable to organized labour. Partly for ideological reasons, partly because of labour’s increasing influence on the Democratic Party, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal proved much more responsive to trade-union demands than had the Republican administrations of the post-World War I era. By now, moreover, key union leaders—most important, John L. Lewis of the UMWA and Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America—had defined what the labour movement most required from the state: protection of the rights of workers to organize and engage in collective bargaining. These rights were asserted in principle under Section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933 and then made thoroughly effective by passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935. More commonly known as the Wagner Act, the latter legislation prohibited employers from interfering with the right of workers to organize and from dominating the organizations they established. It also defined the procedures by which, through majority rule, workers selected their bargaining agents; required employers to bargain with such agents to the end of reaching contractual agreements; and set up, through the National Labor Relations Board, quasi-judicial mechanisms for enforcement of the law. American employers lost the enormous power advantages they had enjoyed in the struggle over collective bargaining, but in exchange the labour movement conceded the highly prized independence from the state that was a core element of pure-and-simple unionism. Under the Wagner Act, collective bargaining remained “free”—that is, the terms of agreements were not to be mandated by the state—but the framework itself came securely under the aegis of state regulation.

At the same time, the New Deal moved to mitigate the market pressures that had driven the antiunionism of American employers. The NIRA legislation, through codes of fair competition, was designed to enable industries to cartelize their depression-ridden markets. The exchange was entirely deliberate—granting representational rights to workers as a price for granting market controls to industry. As the basis of New Deal economic policy, this attempt at industrial stabilization lasted only two years, but the underlying linkage of labour rights and market benefits survived invalidation of the NIRA by the Supreme Court in 1935.

The Wagner Act contained an explicit economic rationale: collective bargaining would generate the mass purchasing power essential for sustained economic growth. This, in turn, prefigured the Keynesian economic policy that, by managing demand, became the government’s way of underwriting the New Deal’s collective bargaining system after World War II. With federal macroeconomic policy (as specified by the Employment Act of 1946) responsible for maintaining long-term demand, and price competition firmly controlled by the restored oligopolistic structures of the major industries (or, as in the transportation and communications sectors, by direct state regulation), the market-driven basis for American antiunionism seemed to have run its course in the postwar era.

Much the same could be said for the labour-process basis for antiunionism in the key mass-production sectors. By the 1930s, the Taylorist crisis over job control had passed; what remained at issue was no longer whether managers had the authority to control the labour process but only how they would exercise it. There were compelling reasons, almost systemic in nature, for the formalization of labour-relationspolicies. For example, where tasks were subdivided and precisely defined, job classification necessarily followed, and from that in turn came the principle of pay equity. Time-and-motion study—another pillar of Taylorist management—meant objective, testable standards for setting the pace of work. Corporate commitment to this formalized system was imperfect, however, and broke down disastrously in the early years of the Great Depression. Rank-and-file fury over job insecurity and intolerable speedups, plus pressure from New Deal agencies and the labour movement, forced management’s hand. Consequently, between 1933 and 1936—before collective bargaining actually began—all the key elements of the modern workplace regime fell more or less into place: specified, uniform rights for workers (beginning with seniority and pay equity); a formal procedure to adjudicategrievances arising from those rights; and a structure of shop-floor representation to implement the grievance procedure. Corporate employers would have much preferred to keep this regime under nonunion conditions. Indeed, it had taken shape in the course of their efforts to implant so-called employee representation plans (i.e., company unions) that they had hoped would satisfy the requirements of New Deal labour policy. But when that strategy failed, managers were prepared to have their workplace regimes incorporated into contractual relationships with independent unions within the terms of the Wagner Act.

To fulfill its part in this process, the labour movement had first of all to adopt an industrial-union (i.e., plantwide) structure appropriate to mass-production industry. The problem was that the AFL was committed to a craft structure and, under its constitutional rules, lacked the means to compel member unions to cede jurisdictions they held over craft workers in the mass-production sector to the emerging industrial unions. This impasse was broken only by a split within the AFL in 1935, leading to the formation of the rival Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) under the leadership of John L. Lewis. Even then, once the CIO unions scored their dramatic unionizing victories in rubber, auto, and steel of 1936 and 1937, a second condition had to be met: the CIO unions had to demonstrate their capacity to enforce the contractual provisions of workplace due process and discipline a turbulent rank and file. World War II brought this second phase to completion. Under close wartime regulation, institutional relations between the CIO and corporate industry were solidified, and, after a strike wave tested the parameters of this relationship in the immediate postwar period, there ensued a system of industrywide collective bargaining that endured for the next 40 years.

The industrial-union struggle spilled over from the United States into Canada. At the insistence of the AFL, the TLC expelled the Canadian branches of the CIO internationals in 1939. The next year these CIO unions joined the remnants of the All-Canadian Congress of Labour, which had formed in 1927 on the dual principles of industrial unionism and Canadian nationalism, to create the Canadian Congress of Labour (CCL) in affiliation with the American CIO. Only during World War II, however, did organizational realities begin to catch up with these superstructural developments. Although stirred by events south of the border, the Canadian movement did not experience a comparable surge of organization during the Great Depression. Only in February 1944 did the wartime administration of W.L. Mackenzie King issue Order in Council P.C. 1003, granting to Canadian workers collective-bargaining rights that American workers already enjoyed under the Wagner Act. The Canadian version, however, allowed for a greater degree of public intervention in the bargaining process. Investigative and cooling-off provisions in labour disputes were already a cornerstone of Canadian policy (going back to Mackenzie King’s Industrial Disputes Investigative Act of 1907), and wartime conditions demanded a no-strike provision (linked to the mandatory inclusion of binding arbitration of grievances in union contracts), which likewise became a permanent feature of Canadian labour-relations law. During the war decade, the Canadian mass-production sector was rapidly organized by CIO unions.

By the early 1950s the organizational situation was similar on both sides of the border. In both countries, one-third of the nonagricultural labour force was unionized. In both countries, the industrial-union federations peaked at roughly two-thirds the size of their longer established craft rivals. At the onset of the Cold War, an internal crisis over Communist participation gripped the labour movements of both countries. Although somewhat different in its details, the outcome was identical on both sides of the border—the expulsion of Communist-dominated unions in 1949 and 1950. And when the American unions settled their differences and merged into the AFL–CIO in 1955, the Canadian federations followed suit the next year by uniting in the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC). At that point, 70 percent of all Canadian unionists belonged to international unions with headquarters in the United States. The 1950s can be said to mark the apex of this historical tendency toward an integrated Canadian-American movement.

Decline and divergence

Beginning in the 1960s, the fortunes of the two movements diverged. In the United States, market pressures steadily eroded the postwar collective-bargaining system. In auto, steel, and clothing, the problem was intensifying foreign competition; in communications, trucking, railroads, and airlines, it was federal deregulation in the 1970s; and elsewhere, as in mining, retailing, and meat processing, a host of nonunionized domestic competitors entered the field. Meanwhile, a structural shift occurred toward a service economy, narrowing the established union base in the goods-producing sectors: production workers made up 30 percent of the nonagricultural U.S. labour force in 1950 but only 22 percent in 1976. The economic troubles that then set in—declining productivity and a slowing growth rate, inflation, the harsh recession of 1982—had a devastating impact on the American movement. Between 1975 and 1984, four million members were lost, and the unionized share of the labour force shrank from 28.9 percent to below 20 percent. If not for public-employee unions, which added two million members between 1956 and 1976, the U.S. labour movement would have found itself in an even more parlous state, as unionization in the private sector slipped to close to pre-New Deal levels.

Canada’s economy was comparably hard hit in these years, yet unions north of the border fared far better. Indeed, they grew steadily after the mid-1960s, and, with 3.5 million members by the early 1980s, claimed over 40 percent of the Canadian labour force—more than twice the union density in the United States. How is this remarkable divergence to be explained?

The decline of the American movement occurred within an increasingly hostile political environment. In Canada, on the other hand, a changing party system enhanced labour’s place in Canadian public life. In 1961, with the backing of Canadian labour, the New Democratic Party (NDP) was formed as a social-democratic rival to the Liberal and Progressive Conservative parties. As it made headway, the NDP changed the landscape of Canadian politics. For its part, Canadian organized labour, by abandoning the nonpartisanship espoused by the AFL–CIO, not only gained political muscle but also became a progressive force in the nation’s public life. It assumed the mantle of what has been called “social unionism”—in stark contrast to the political marginalization of the AFL–CIO that followed the collapse of the Democratic New Deal coalition in the late 1960s.

Beginning with passage of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which applied unfair-labour-practice provisions to unions and in a variety of ways weakened their economic and organizational power, labour law in the United States became steadily more burdensome to the labour movement. By contrast, Canadian federal and provincial law retained, and even deepened, its pro-union bias. Nor was there any Canadian counterpart to U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s decision in 1981 to break a strike by federal air-traffic controllers—an act of enormous symbolic importance that legitimized the resurgence of antiunionism in corporate America. Antiunionism gained no such public legitimacy in Canada. Underlying this was a factor emphasized by the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset: that collectivist values inhering in Canadian political culture granted the labour movement a legitimacy it never quite achieved in the more entrepreneurial nation south of the border.

As these divergences became more marked, the “international” character of the North American movement began to wane. Public-employee unionism—even more prominent a recent development in Canada than in the United States—would have sufficed in itself to push the Canadian movement in an independent direction, but Canadian branches in the private sector as well began to break loose, some by seeking greater autonomy within their international unions, but others—including those of communications workers, paper workers, woodworkers, and auto workers—by splitting off and becoming independent. A dwindling share of the Canadian movement—less than 35 percent by 1990—retained ties to the AFL–CIO. Two developments offered some prospect for reviving the integrationist bent of the North American movement: first, the creation of a common U.S.-Canadian economic market and, second, the deepening crisis in Canada over an independent Quebec. But, in the main, events of the 1970s and ’80s merely underscored the very different dynamics that were driving the Canadian and American trade-union movements and that seemed to be carrying them farther apart along separate paths of national development.